Hackers have stolen nearly $180 million in cryptocurrency from Beanstalk Farms, a decentralised finance (De-Fi) project.
Beanstalk operates a system where participants earn rewards by contributing funds to a central funding pool that is used to balance the value of one token at close to $1, reports The Verge.
"Beanstalk suffered an exploit. The Beanstalk Farms team is investigating the attack and will make an announcement to the community as soon as possible, " the company admitted in a tweet.
The hackers exploited Beanstalk's majority vote governance system, a core feature of many DeFi protocols.
The attack was first spotted by blockchain analytics company PeckShield.
The Beanstalk attacker "used a flash loan obtained through the decentralised protocol Aave to borrow close to $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets and exchanged these for enough beans to gain a 67 per cent voting stake in the project".
The attacker then instantly repaid the flash loan, netting an $80 million profit, the report said.
In January this year, hackers stole crypto tokens worth $120 million from Blockchain-based decentralised finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO. Several crypto wallets were drained before the platform could stop the cyber attack.
In December last year, cyber criminals stole cryptocurrency worth $80 million from Qubit Finance, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform.
The US this week blamed North Korean hacker group Lazarus for stealing $625 million in cryptocurrency from the Ronin Network, owned by developer group Sky Mavis.